The absence of sharp definition which characterizes Rodin’s later work is evidently based upon principles closely allied to those of the impressionist painter. By relying upon masses of colour, light and shade, the latter secures breadth and an impression of unity which a too rigid adherence to line often destroys. By exaggerating the contour in one place, and by lessening the outline here and sharpening it there, Rodin seeks to get closer to the natural effect produced by the action of light and shadow upon the natural object than a sculptor who relies upon pure form alone.
The case of the sculptor, however, differs considerably from that of the painter. It is, of course, obvious that form is, in a sense, a mere convention, whether in painting or sculpture. No one can argue that the eye has any immediate knowledge of form, any more than it can be said that lines really exist in nature. But form is a convention which every sculptor, from Phidias to Donatello, and from Michael Angelo to Houdon, has accepted. True, no sculptor is concerned with form and form only. Michael Angelo did not forget that his formal arrangements—to describe the figures of “[Dawn]” and “[Night]” in the baldest possible terms—would be seen by the aid of the sun and through the Florentine atmosphere. But it is a long cry from this intelligent use of light and shade to the ultra-modern justification for the distorted grotesques of such a sculptor as Rosso. Here are Rosso’s words:
“Art must be nothing else than the expression of some sudden sensation given us by light. There is no such thing as painting or sculpture. There is only light.”
AUGUSTE RODIN
THE THINKER
The Pantheon, Paris
It cannot be denied that if Rosso’s works are viewed from a given distance, the proportions are rectified by the play of light and shade, and that the result is a surprising illusion of life. But, regarded as statues, the things are little more than fascinating tricks.
In such an absolute sense as this, the term “impressionist” cannot properly be applied to Rodin. It may, however, be used in another and broader sense as indicating an artist who seeks to express the synthesis of things as he sees them under the influence of a mood.
Rodin knows that he is neither a contemporary of Phidias nor Donatello. He rightly refuses to confine himself to forms which the Athenians and the Florentines happened to find most suitable for the expression of their experience. This is the simple justification for much that is regarded as iconoclastic in his artistic creed. When he cries: “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of the clean, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures,” Rodin merely asserts a closer kinship with the Gothic than the Greek ideal. Whether Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles are right and Rodin wrong, matters little. The all-important question is whether Rodin’s reliance upon the ridges which express spiritual tension, and his willingness to utilize tortuous poses which a Greek would have rejected, have enabled him to sound a new note of passion in sculpture. We hold that they have.